“Wen token?”

It’s the refrain heard in Discord servers around the world. When is such-and-such project going to airdrop a token to its community members?

This question is particularly urgent if a community happens to assemble around a $2 billion NFT project – one like Bored Ape Yacht Club. That’s why BAYC had an answer to the question in October:

As the Bored Ape holders have discovered, it’s super cool to launch a non-fungible token collection and see a community develop around it. But at some point it gets difficult to herd all the cats – especially if said cats are also very rich people. What if there were some way to coordinate them and align their interests? What if you could do all of this on-chain? With a cryptographic token perhaps?

This article is part of Culture Week, which explores how crypto is changing media and entertainment.

This is why the future of NFTs is fungible. The many NFT communities that have sprung up this year are finding that it’s not so easy to manage a community with unique tokens alone.

Fungible tokens created by the community start to become very attractive in theory. Luckily for them, this concept already exists: it’s the world of social tokens – streams of community-centric tokens that are, yes, fungible.

The non-fungible argument

Social tokens have been ably covered in the pages of this fine website for some time. Here’s a great Jeff Wilser feature that dives deep into the genre. But here’s a quick summary of how they’re supposed to work: Suppose you spot a promising young artist from among the selection presented to you by Spotify’s algorithm.

You stream their music thousands of times over the years, gradually attending concerts and buying merch. Eventually, the artist breaks through to the mainstream and is picking up Grammys left and right, and appearing on “Saturday Night Live.”

The above example might be called the “Taylor Swift Hypothesis” of social tokens. The way the hypothesis works is, imagine injecting a token into the scenario above. What if that artist is Taylor Swift, and what if she has issued $SWIFT in the earliest days of your fandom.

You might have accumulated lots of $SWIFT, watching the stash grow in fiat money terms as Taylor ascended the heights of pop stardom. The Swift Hypothesis is described in the Index Ventures investor Rex Woodbury’s recent think piece on social tokens in The Atlantic.

But let’s look at why some NFT believers think fungible tokens for communities don’t work. Here’s GMoney, the cutesy, pixelated, half-man, half-monkey NFT collector making his argument:

A stash of tokens is first held by a creator who distributes the tokens to fans. As the creator creates more valuable work, those tokens rise in price. But to realize those gains, the creator must continuously sell the tokens to fans. This leaves creators with a diminishing horde of tokens, thus disincentivizing them to increase the value of their work.

“Your incentives are misaligned,” GMoney says.

That’s the catch: Taylor would have been dumping $SWIFT on her fans all the way to the top. Her most loyal fans would have been her exit liquidity, to adopt the parlance of Crypto Twitter. The Swift Hypothesis would become the Swift Pump and Dump if that was the only way social tokens worked.

And GMoney isn’t alone among the cryptorati casting doubt on social tokens. Here’s Simon de la Rouviere, one of the authors of the ERC-721 standard, positing that NFTs are, in fact, better social tokens!

The social tokens rebuttal

This is as good a place as any to mention that I have a vested interest in social tokens working. I’m an adviser at Rally, which helps esports streamers, musicians and creators of all stripes issue their own tokens to fans. I’m also a contributor and investor in Seed Club, an accelerator for social token projects.

As we know in crypto, misaligned incentives is one of the most damning charges that can be leveled at a project. So I turned to Jess Sloss, the person who started Seed Club and who stays at the cutting edge of social tokens, for a robust rebuttal to GMoney’s monkey business.

“Social tokens are better equity,” Sloss tells me. Dear reader, before you start dialing the Securities and Exchange Commission hotline for unregistered securities offerings, this is what he really meant by that: Fungible tokens for a community are more expressive than NFTs.

While NFTs might be good at capital raising and formation, they are less good at keeping a community going. This is where social tokens come in.

“What many of these communities haven’t thought through is how to sustain [them] into the future?” Sloss says. “Ultimately, we need to be able to reward more nuanced collaboration and represent that in the governance stack.”

For instance, a community might need to pay core members for development or editorial work. It might need to raise new funding without diluting existing creative work. It might also need a way to vote on stuff.

Here’s how Sloss frames it, using the startup as a metaphor: “If a creator has a community of fans looking to create something bigger and more broad than the work of that creator, then a fungible token makes a lot of sense.

See also: Missed the ENS Airdrop? | Opinion

“Essentially, you have a bank account and a cap table. The fungible token represents that cap table that you can use to pay people, sell for investment [and] reward people for the work they do in that community. All those things are very hard to do with an NFT unless you’re minting new NFTs and giving them away, or you’re holding bags of NFTs ... You’re going to get stuck at some point.”

Bored Apes could be a glimpse into the future of an NFT community that gets coordinated around a new, fungible, token. SquiggleDAO, which Sloss works on, is another example: a collector DAO for generative art and Chromie Squiggles in particular, its $SQUIG token lets holders vote on how they use the DAO’s resources, which includes $8 million in USDC it raised from selling $SQUIG to big investors.

The fun in fungible

What else can you do with a social token? Sloss corrects me: The term of art now is community tokens or community DAOs. He says he’s seeing a surge of interest in founders of Web 2 companies exploring how to disperse ownership of their firms to communities using a DAO as he sifts through applications for Seed Club’s fourth cohort (the third cohort had Pussy Riot and other notables).

 “They’re recognizing they’re building on a tech stack that will be quickly outdated and will have a tough time competing with a Web 3 version of their product,” he said. “There’s an explosion of DAOs being created right now.”The hottest use cases, Sloss says, are DAOs that aid learning, particularly learning about Web 3.

He name DAO Masters, Web3 baddies (“welcome to the hot girl metaverse”) and the Crypto, Culture and Society DAO as prime examples. He’s also bullish on a token from the industry newsletter Water and Music that incentivizes research on music and technology among its subscribers.

“I think longevity is going to come into the operations,” Sloss says. “It’s like, let’s go out and buy the Constitution … then what? The ‘then what’ is the exciting part.”

From DOH! to DAO: The Rise of Decentralized Organizations

ConstitutionDAO was just the start. The range and ambition of DAOs is only growing.

In the summer of 2016, Joe Lubin, one of the eight co-founders of Ethereum, was in midtown Manhattan to talk about how blockchain could transform accounting practices. While surely a fascinating topic, most people in the room that day wanted to know Lubin’s opinion in the wake of the theft of $55 million in ether from The DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization.This post is part of CoinDesk’s Culture Week.

He’d never been a fan of the project – which pooled startup capital to fund Ethereum projects chosen by the DAO members. Only a week or so before, in a still controversial move, Ethereum users voted to change the history of the blockchain to allow the ether stolen from The DAO to be returned.

When asked about it and any lingering effects the so-called hard fork would have on the network he helped create, Lubin said Ethereum was still too young and unsophisticated to handle something like a decentralized private equity fund.

“It was deemed by some of us to be possibly systematically destabilizing,” he told the audience at Microsoft’s office in Times Square. Then, in what could certainly be the most evergreen quote in all crypto, he said, “Naïve people in the cryptocurrency space buy these tokens because they think they’ll get rich.”While that sentiment hasn’t changed, DAOs sure have.

For years after the DAO hack and hard fork the d-word wasn’t spoken. In 2017, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released a report on the incident where it ruled DAO tokens had been sold as unregistered securities, but chose not to go after anyone.

Since then a lot of work has been done on how the terribly named entities are structured and funded, and 2022 may be the year that they make a broad comeback while touching on industries far afield from crypto. Still, a lot of questions are left to be answered and the tools to manage DAOs are in their infancy.

Read more: What Is a DAO?

“My starting assumption is DAOs are one of these inventions within crypto that are not going to be un-invented,” said Ryan Selkis, co-founder and chief executive officer of research and analytics firm Messari. “You’re now seeing an explosion of innovation around DAO design.” Messari recently released a suite of DAO governance tools called Governor to help the organizations keep track of voting, member participation and treasury maintenance.

At its essence, a DAO is an organizing principle. It can be applied to a lot of people or a few, but what’s constant is the hierarchy, which is meant to be flat, with every member given a vote in how the DAO’s mission – whatever it may be – is executed.

While in many cases DAOs have to start with the vision of one person or a small group of people, the goal is to grow the membership until everyone is engaged in DAO management within an area they find engaging.

The projects employing that structure are now blooming far outside the crypto world. From a DAO intent on buying an National Basketball Association basketball team, to one that wants to restore ocean health to one dedicated to increasing the wealth of women, or a DAO that wanted to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution, the range and breadth of how DAOs are being thought of is staggering.

The list of DAOs to emerge in 2022 and beyond is far more exhaustive than those examples, yet the connection from the digital world to the real one is a unifying strength most of these projects share.

“Using DAOs to pool capital to make a real-world impact is a big category,” said Aaron Wright, who almost single-handedly brought DAOs back into fashion when he helped create the LAO in 2019 as a co-founder at OpenLaw, a digital contracting system. (The LAO, with some important changes, seeks to serve the same funding function for Ethereum startups that The DAO pioneered.)

Other categories Wright expects to be big in DAOLand include ones that produce creative content, social groups like Friends With Benefits, not-for-profit DAOs and services-oriented groups built on a guild model where software developers, for example, can join to find work opportunities.

“The notion that small groups of people can compete with Silicon Valley is true,” Wright said. “That’s one of the visions of the DAO, that the community can support itself.”

Due to their open and collaborative nature, DAOs may also help diversify crypto culture that mirrors much of the traditional models.

“The face of crypto right now is white and male,” said Alana Podrx, founder of Eve Wealth, a DAO formed to build women’s wealth. She noted 75% of crypto holders are men. “If we’re going to invent the future of the financial system, we need to make sure it looks different and is diverse.”

Get the whole of CoinDesk’s Culture Week.

The tools to pull together a potentially global effort like Eve Wealth in DAO form have been created in just the last six months, Podrx said. “Before this we would have had to develop our own token access tools and create smart contracts,” she said. “Instead, we did it in 15 minutes with CollabLand and Coinvise.”

What started as a small group of financially ambitious women from Podrx’s network in traditional finance soon grew to more than 300 female accredited investors. They set the goal of filling in the space between robo advising and high net-worth wealth management, she said. The collaboration or co-op ethos of a DAO has come naturally to the women in Eve Wealth, she said.

“We forget that women have had to use soft power for all of history,” Podrx said. “We are all invested in the success of the community.”

The global reach of DAOs is also gaining traction as seen when ConstitutionDAO formed and within a few days raised about $47 million to try to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. While problems arose with refunding member money when the bid failed – more like ConstitutionDOH! – the network effect and international reach was impressive.

That’s the force behind Krause House DAO as well, which is on a mission to buy an NBA basketball team.

Co-founder Flex Chapman (not his real name, but we’ll get to that) had initially been interested in creating DAO software tools with his partner. “DAOs have no shortage of problems with them now,” he said. They soon realized forming a DAO would be much more exciting than making software tools for them, and Krause House was born. In November, Krause House raised 1,000 ether on Mirror worth about $4.4 million.

A DAO structure rewrites the rules for collective ownership, allowing possibly hundreds of thousands of Krause House members to vote on team decisions rather than an owner and general manager making those calls, Chapman said.

 While the amount of money to buy an NBA team is in the billions of dollars, Krause House plans to keep its members engaged by hosting real-world events like pickup basketball leagues and virtual games like fantasy leagues and ask-me-anythings (AMA) with NBA players, according to the Krause House Mirror page.

Chapman said not everything in the world needs to be decentralized but that a DAO makes the outsized ambition of Krause House easier to achieve. “People are seeing the benefits,” he said. His partner and he chose to use pseudonyms to separate themselves from their past experience with Web 2 startups, he said. “I think Web 3 is a revolution and I wanted to have a clean take,” Chapman said.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to bring DAOs more mainstream, said OpenLaw’s Wright. “The shape of what they will look like, I still don’t have a clear vision of it,” he said. “That’s the question – where are we in the cycle and no one really knows right now.”

Messari’s Selkis was more sanguine. DAOs are as important as layer one blockchains, DeFi protocols and NFTs, and should be used to govern the broader decentralized landscape, he said.

“You’re talking about one of the primary building blocks for crypto,” he said.

DISCLOSURE

The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.




Matthew Leising

Matthew Leising worked for Bloomberg News for 17 years and started covering crypto in 2015. In 2020, he published “Out of the Ether,” a history of Ethereum and the people who created it. Earlier this year he co-founded DeCential Media which is dedicated to telling stories of the founders, builders and visionaries of the new decentralized world.

Cryptocurrency markets have continued to grow in size and popularity over the past few years, leading some investors to speculate that they are on their way to becoming a mainstream asset class, and others to insist they already are.

The infrastructure bill currently before Congress certainly is a step in that direction, as it contains a provision specifically addressing cryptocurrencies.

 But this same provision could threaten this burgeoning market for crypto by enforcing stricter reporting requirements and other burdens required of securities registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

• How Do I Spend My Bitcoin? (And Where?)

These digital tokens, unlike any other asset class, have no one governing body overseeing them. Nor do they have a centralized, regulated exchange where people can trade these unregistered securities.

This might change soon enough if legislation before Congress passes and future decisions change this nebulous treatment.Let's explore the infrastructure bill's nod toward eventually setting up the SEC as a crypto regulator.

How Are Cryptocurrencies Presently Regulated?

That's a trick question, in a sense, because they really aren't – at least not in a straightforward way. As Daniel Gouldman, co-founder of Unbanked, puts it: 

"The regulatory expectations for cryptocurrencies are a bit blurred. Different regulators claim to regulate it; the SEC uses a Supreme Court ruling from 1946 (SEC vs. Howey) to determine what does and does not qualify as a security. The [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] has said cryptocurrencies should be regulated more like a commodity.

The IRS taxes it as property, and an advisor at FinCEN recently called crypto 'just another means of payment.'"

• 13 Bitcoin ETFs and Cryptocurrency Funds You Should Know

As compared to assets such as stocks, which trade on public markets and have regulations from the SEC and FINRA to hold public companies and brokerage firms accountable, cryptocurrencies currently have no one party responsible for overseeing them.

To date, the only intervention seen by the SEC has come from its third stated mission above (capital formation), in that they reserve the right to regulate any initial coin offering (ICO) or crypto issuance which meets the regulatory definition of "security.

" ICOs represent the crypto world's equivalent of an initial public offering (IPO), in the stock market. The SEC takes fraudulent ICOs seriously and has gone to some lengths to regulate their issuance to the investing public if they detect any semblance of impropriety or fraud.

But to date, few initial coin offerings have been regulated. In fact, anyone with the technical chops can create a new virtual currency and launch it to the public through ICO. The SEC typically only gets involved in these when they detect scamming or any sort of fraudulent activity.

What Could the Infrastructure Bill Do to Crypto Regulation?

Despite the dearth of a clear regulatory framework overseeing crypto in the U.S., legislation currently sits in the House of Representatives that could be a step toward determining its fate, for better or worse.

• 8 Biggest Cryptocurrencies to Watch Right Now

The infrastructure bill, targeted at investing $1.2 trillion over the ensuing eight years, would have tighter tax reporting requirements levied on brokers who facilitate cryptocurrency trading, among other types of trading. This would raise a projected $28 billion from more stringent information reporting for cryptocurrency transactions.

At issue with the legislation isn't stricter reporting requirements, but rather, the definition used for the term "broker.

" Some people feel it has been defined too broadly in the current infrastructure bill, causing the requirements to potentially fall on all participants in the crypto market.

This means not only would brokers need to report, but also other entities in the crypto value chain, such as developers and crypto miners.Though, there appears to be support for narrowing the definition.

According to Gouldman, "There's a bipartisan consensus among Democrats and Republicans alike that cryptocurrency should be regulated carefully just as [the United States] did with the regulation in the early days of the internet.

"This overly broad choice of language could have damaging effects if left unaltered, hence what has led to the bipartisan consensus (something rarely seen in Washington these days) that it needs to be fixed.

Given the broad bipartisan support, it stands to reason that if an amendment could be allowed to proceed, it would likely pass, fixing the issue.

Broker definition aside, the proposed changes aim to accomplish more than simply finding another source of funding for the bill, but also accomplishing a few goals that regulators would like to see met long-term: better reporting, transparency and integrity.

For now, the infrastructure bill's language doesn't change how the SEC – or any other regulatory body, for that matter – sees cryptocurrency. What it does provide is a first step for crypto regulation, as well as more clear guidance for the future.

What Does This Mean for Crypto Going Forward?

Taking this first step toward better reporting and transparency could be the first of many ahead for the cryptocurrency asset class. Sentiment about regulation on crypto appears mixed, with some reasoning that would erode the core value proposition of cryptocurrency in the first place: a decentralized, transparent and anonymous store of value and unit of account that largely protects people from fraud and criminal activities. 

• Should You Buy the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO)?

On the last two points, there's still room for improvement, to be sure.However, to allow crypto to flourish and fulfill the potential its biggest proponents advocate, Gouldman offers advice to the U.S. government. 

"[The government] needs to build a regulatory framework that properly balances the responsibilities around tax obligations, anti-money laundering concerns and fraudulent behavior with innovation, entrepreneurship and consumer privacy and rights," he says.With these tenets in mind, the infrastructure bill awaiting approval in Congress could have huge implications for how these digital tokens are treated by federal regulators and the public at large going forward.

The question of whether these unregulated securities should be regulated is quickly becoming moot as many see it as an inevitability with the size and scale of the asset class. Instead, lawmakers would do well to recognize their mere consideration of including crypto provisions in this bill indicates that crypto is here to stay. 

As such, they'd be wise to be careful and precise about how they handle this burgeoning asset class and its potential.

While Robert Leshner seemed to briefly threaten users with the IRS, the reality is that he – and the rest of the Compound Labs community – are now relying on the goodwill of users.

By Andrew ThurmanOct 1, 2021 at 9:51 p.m.Updated Oct 1, 2021 at 11:18 p.m.




Compound founder Robert Leshner (Robert Leshner)


If a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol accidentally gave you millions of dollars in tokens, are you obligated to give it back?

In an interview with CoinDesk following an $80 million exploit, Compound Labs founder Robert Leshner is arguing users should do just that.

On Wednesday night, a bug in money market Compound’s code led to an erroneous disbursement of COMP tokens intended for long-term liquidity mining rewards.

0 seconds of 6 minutes, 21 secondsVolume 90% Read more: DeFi Money Market Compound Overpays Millions in COMP Rewards in Possible Exploit; Founder Says $80M at Risk

The Compound Twitter handle acknowledged the bug shortly after, saying that no user funds were at risk. The bug only applied to Compound’s Comptroller Contract, which is responsible for distributing liquidity mining rewards earned over time.

Nearly the entirety of the Comptroller Contract has now been drained, with 280,000 COMP distributed to users incorrectly, according to Leshner.0 seconds of 6 minutes, 21 secondsVolume 90% Despite the eye-popping sums lost to the bug, however, the community is now captivated by a debate as to what users should be obligated to do with their funds.

“This has been, without a doubt, the worst day in the history of the Compound protocol,” Leshner told CoinDesk.

He went on:“What makes it way worse is that I and most folks are completely powerless to do anything besides sit back and watch this moral dilemma play out.”

IRS threats

In a Tweet on Thursday night, Leshner seemed to warn recipients of the erroneous tokens that there could be real-world consequences for keeping them – namely, that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) might want to hear about it:

Some members of the DeFi community interpreted the comments to mean that Compound Labs was planning to report recipients to relevant tax authorities. Leshner apologized for the tweet shortly after.

Threats of “doxxing” have proven to be effective in dealing with exploits in the past – last month, a non-fungible token (NFT) team memorably threatened to call in the FBI and ordered soup to a hacker’s address. The hacker relented, returning stolen funds.

However, in this instance even if an organization wished to pursue claimants, in practicality it may be an empty threat.

Compound Labs is a real-world entity that is working on the protocol, but there’s no clear basis for it to pursue legal action – the structure of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is such that it is now just another member of the community, according to a Compound Labs representative.

The representative also said the Compound interface is hosted on distributed file storage protocol InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and there’s no reportable information about users collected in any way.

However, due to the nature of the bug, many of the recipients of the tokens are not sophisticated hackers – they just happened to hit the jackpot.

Their operational security, or opsec, isn’t hacker-grade. Some addresses that claimed large sums of the tokens have interacted with centralized exchanges where their real-world information is stored, and the claims could have an impact on their taxes.

Claiming the funds required no knowledge of the bug, and some users might not have been aware there was an exploit underway – they may have received millions while intending to harvest much smaller sums as rewards.

Leshner said the DeFi community has rallied around the protocol in an effort to find solutions. Yearn.Finance and MakerDAO representatives have been active in community channels in finding short- and long-term solutions.

However, Compound has an “extremely rigid” and slow governance process by design – architecture intended to make the protocol more resilient is now acting as a barrier to a fix. It will take another five days before the community can approve any updates to the contract code.

Technical solutions to the initial bug aside, however, the protocol now faces an even bigger problem: trying to convince users who received tokens to return them to the community.

“In my opinion, this is a bank error in a couple people’s favor,” said Leshner.He went on:

“I think it’s harder because there was nothing deliberately criminal. If there was a hacker who deliberately exploited the code, people would celebrate going after them with every means possible. These users weren’t initially malicious.”

Moral dilemma

The question now turns to whether a moral obligation, rather than a legal one, can incite users to return funds – a question that has prompted significant debate in the crypto community.

One popular take is that “code is law” – regardless of intention, the protocol disbursed the funds and now users can spend them as they please.

However, others are appealing to the notion of “public goods” – that taking ill-gotten money from an on-chain bank, where anyone in the world can take out a loan regardless of who they are, is a violation of DeFi’s highest ideals.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Leshner said the moral dilemma can be split roughly into two camps.

“There’s a lot of members of the community that view protocols like Compound as benefitting the entire ecosystem,” he said. “And there are some users that don’t necessarily care. The builder mindset is, ‘This adds value, this is crucially important,’ and the trader mindset is ‘Money is money,’ and that’s the only ethos of crypto.”

He went on:

“I’m personally hopeful users will return funds to the community. It’s not my property, it’s not their property, it’s the community’s property.”So far, two users have returned a total of 37,493 COMP tokens worth over $12 million at the time of writing.

“There are ideas to further incentivize people to return the COMP that they received,” Leshner said, but even with some incentive program “it’s still going to be relying on people doing the right thing.”

Read more: ‘Free Money’ Bug Hits DeFi Platform Alchemix

Some potential incentives have already been proposed, including non-fungible tokens (NFT) redeemable for a meeting with Leshner, to which he enthusiastically agreed:

“I want to hear other people’s views on this, because it’s not my decision,” he said. “This is a decision every user has to make themselves, and I think most of them are taking the view of, ‘Haha, f**k you guys, it’s your problem.’”

DISCLOSURE

The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies.

CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Daily trading volume on the top NFT marketplace has dropped by more than 80% over the past month.

Daily trading volume on OpenSea, the largest non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, has fallen dramatically from the $323 million peak in August to about $52 million Thursday, according to Dune Analytics.


Daily trading

volume on OpenSea (Dune Analytics)

The staggering drop could affirm thinking in some corners that the NFT market is a bubble that has popped. But several market observers say the market remains vibrant and far from finished.

“This doesn’t mean the NFT season is just over yet,” Ong Joo Kian, research analyst at Delphi Digital, wrote in a market commentary to clients. “There’s still a lot of attention on the space.”

Ong said that a few hyped projects such as Mutant Apes Yacht Club caused “a massive uptick” in NFT trading volume at the end of August and that a subsequent slowdown was not unexpected.

Others say the NFT market has merely hit a temporary plateau, as it looks for the next big project to generate more cash and new users.

“It’s possible we’re experiencing a top in certain NFT categories like PFP [profile pics] or avatar NFTs,” Messari Senior Research Analyst Mason Nystrom said. “But it only takes one new and exciting project to help the market reach a new top.”

But observers do not know what new NFT themes will spur a market resurgence. A number of recent projects have covered roughly the same ground.

“The number of projects with similar ideas – such as those Loot copycats – has increased, but we are not seeing more new participants coming into the NFT sector,” Martha Zhang, founder of NFT platform StarryNift, told CoinDesk.

The top NFTs by trading volume were Loot, CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, according to OpenSea, which is a secondary marketplace for bidding on and trading NFTs.

The daily trading volume for CryptoPunks declined by more than 90%. The floor price for CryptoPunks, according to NFT Price Floor, is currently at around 90 ether, down from an August peak of 132 ether. Floor price refers to the lowest price of any NFT within a certain category (in this case, the CryptoPunk collection).

OpenSea logged record-high trading volume a month ago amid the launch of Pudgy Penguins and a slew of other popular NFT projects. The hype around these projects dramatically increased activity on OpenSea.

Sales volumes of CryptoPunks, one of the most popular NFT projects, broke NFT daily sales records on Aug. 23, not long after credit-card giant Visa entered the market and purchased one.

Delphi’s Ong said that as the Ethereum blockchain has become congested, some NFT activities have spilled over to other layer 1 blockchains such as Solana.

That trend could consequently slow NFT growth on the Ethereum blockchain. OpenSea continues to rank first with over 1,560 ether ($5,467,148) for gas consumption to pay transaction fees on Ethereum over the past 24 hours, according to Dune Analytics.

Many layer 1 blockchain projects such as Solana provide faster, lower-cost transactions compared to Ethereum, which can be attractive for the NFT market. Crypto exchange FTX’s U.S. version recently announced the launch of a minting platform for NFTs that’s built on both Ethereum and Solana.

“The NFT market will certainly continue to grow, [and] it’s just a matter of how fast and how volatile the growth will be,” Messari’s Nystrom said.

This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. Nothing mentioned in this article constitutes any type of solicitation, recommendation, offer or endorsement to buy and sell any crypto asset.

Trading in any financial market involves risk and can result in loss of funds. Before investing any money, one should always conduct thorough research and seek professional advice.



Muyao Shen

Muyao is a reporter on the markets team. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.Follow @MuyaoShen on Twitter

The highest bid for a non-fungible token (NFT) collection of 101 bored-looking apes has fetched $19 million at Sotheby’s, surpassing the auction house’s original estimate of $12 million to $18 million.

The auction – set to close in just under two days – features NFTs from Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). They’re among the 10,000 algorithmically generated images on the Ethereum blockchain featuring cartoon apes with a range of traits, outfits and accessories, from bunny ears to fezzes and 3D glasses.

The lot also contains six rare “serums” that, when applied to an existing Bored Ape, will mutate its characteristics, thereby increasing its uniqueness and value. (Think face-melting.)

The Sotheby’s auction also includes a second lot of Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC) NFTs, a collection of unique digital dogs bred as companions to the Bored Apes. At press time, the highest bid for the BAKC collection reached $550,000, below Sotheby’s estimated $1.5 million to $2.0 million.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club took the NFT world by storm earlier this spring, selling out all 10,000 original Bored Apes upon launch and touting celebrities and athletes as collectors.

The project highlights the community-building aspect that has become increasingly important to new NFT projects. Each Bored Ape doubles as a “Yacht Club” membership card, granting the holder to members-only benefits, including access to the BAYC Bathroom, a “dive bar bathroom” where each ape-holder will be able to paint a pixel on the digital bathroom wall every 15 minutes. BAYC envisions the Bathroom as “a members-only canvas for the discerning minds of crypto twitter.”

Read more: The Value of NFTs Is Belonging

“The power of the Bored Ape Yacht Club is in its members and how relentlessly creative, supportive, aligned, and f**king funny our community is,” a Yuga Labs founder who goes by Gargamel wrote in a Discord post. “It’s what has made it possible to go from inception to the biggest auction houses in the world in just four months.”

Individual Bored Apes are currently selling at a “floor price” – the minimum for which one can be had – of 40 WETH, or approximately $140,000 on OpenSea.It’s not just Sotheby’s. Next, the BAYC will be featured in the rival auction house Christie’s No Time Like Present online auction running from Sept. 17 to Sept. 28.

The auction will also include a group of Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks and will mark the very first NFT sale in Asia offered by an international auction house.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDC) are fast gaining popularity worldwide, including in Nigeria. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) recently outlined plans to launch an eNaira in October.

CBDCs operate just like the money you see when you check your bank accounts online, with the eNaira issued by CBN and held directly in citizens’ digital wallets.

While cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC, 2.86%) are decentralized, unregulated and unbacked, CBDCs are regulated, centralized and backed by a central bank (the regulator).

Olumide Adesina is a Nigeria-based certified investment trader with more than a decade experience.

CBDCs are typically pegged to the fiat currency in place at the central bank. Compared to the wild volatility of crypto assets, the value of a CDBC is backed by the country’s monetary reserves.

“The eNaira is the Central Bank of Nigeria’s attempt to stay in tandem with other global central banks as decentralized modes of storing value and payment become more mainstream,” said Samuel Sule, a director with the Renaissance Capital investment bank.

But he cautioned that Nigerians could see the project as rendering decentralized digital assets as obsolete.

“There are underlying philosophical questions around the centralization of digital currencies, which could make it unappealing to a large section of its users.

That said, monetary policy legally remains the exclusive realm of central banks. Thus, all work done around new modes of value storage and transmission is justifiable.”

Good

The CBN aims for the CBDC to increase financial inclusion rapidly and easily. Creating and holding funds for citizens in a central bank account could offer better access to financial services for the unbanked or underbanked.

Ben Constanty, co-founder of Smartlink, which brings applications to the decentralized web, highlighted some of the unique opportunities the CBDC can provide citizens of Africa’s biggest economy in regards to mobile accessibility:

“As Nigeria is still considered one the most ‘unbanked’ countries in the world, decentralized identity systems and CBDCs will provide the population with a way to prove their identity and get access to banking services directly from their smartphone.

It also means that every transaction will go through that system in order to buy and sell things.”

The CBDC will also make remittances easier. With restrictions on foreign exchange and the high transaction fees associated with transferring money in and out of the country, many Nigerians are already using bitcoin to make domestic and international transactions cheaper and faster.

In addition, the central bank will be able to achieve its objectives of safeguarding people’s money, ensuring a safe and resilient payment system, and strengthening public confidence in the naira. As it provides transparency and is difficult to counterfeit, it could be a good way to combat economic crime and fraud.

Volume 90% With the eNaira, consumers can access low-risk and reliable payment options.

By eliminating the need for third parties, the CBDC could contribute to efficient and low-cost transactions.The CBN will also be able to implement the cashless policy and numerous jobs will be created for Nigeria’s booming youth population as a result.

Taxes and transaction costs will increase the government’s revenue. And it should help to combat terrorism financing, illicit fund flows and criminal activities, and enhance oversight of fund movements and payments.

Bad

But the eNaira could give the CBN greater control. A growing user base for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has already made Nigerian financial regulators worry about losing control over the money supply.

The momentum is considered by them as a threat to economic stability and money in general.

Some economists also believe the CBN can spend in deficit and shift funds directly to citizens without worrying about the national debt in times of economic hardship. In other words, a CBDC could present an obvious inflation risk.

The eNaira might disintermediate the banking sector if it becomes mainstream. Nowadays, Nigerian commercial banks serve as intermediaries between depositors and intermediaries so funds can be secure and are available when needed; the intermediary gives interest as a means of attracting funds for a specified period of time.

Read More: 

Nigeria Is the Lion of Africa in Bitcoin P2P Trading | Olumide Adesina

Nigerian banks might face a challenge when dealing with such digital assets. In the case of the CBN, for instance, offering everyone a virtual wallet where they can store their money, there would be little need for banks today.

Unless the CBN grants the banks new licenses to do this you do not need a bank to administrate your wallet, thereby increasing the redundancy of the Nigerian banking industry.

The eNaira also raises big concerns when it comes to privacy, especially with a government that violates human rights on a regular basis. The centralized digital asset could also eliminate the privacy that cash provides.

This could serve as a tool for financial regulators monitoring human rights organizations and what they do with contributions they receive.

“As central banks globally jump on the digital currencies wagon, the space is likely to witness more regulations, limitations and even censorship, as these will be controlled networks,” says Constanty.

Ugly

The hideous thing about the Nigerian digital currency is that it centralizes money even more and preserves the oligopoly power of the CBN. Unlike crypto assets, such as bitcoin and ethereum (ETH, 10.10%) that aim to democratize and decentralize finance, the Nigerian digital currency grants near-total control to the Nigerian apex bank.

The confidentiality and anonymity of transactions are reduced when central banks monitor and control transactions more closely. Each transaction can be monitored, recorded, analyzed and taxed using digital tools provided by the CBN.

This would also enhance control over the level of access a Nigerian citizen has to a financial system, particularly if the citizen attempts to engage in behavior considered threatening by the financial authority.

Inevitably, the Nigerian digital currency would cause centralization, a situation that would exacerbate already rife cyber vulnerabilities and increase attack surfaces and vectors, making the Nigerian central bank a target.

Read More: 

How Crypto Can Help Nigeria’s Economy | Olumide Adesina

Will the CBDC mean an end to decentralized currencies?Not according to Jill Richmond, International Policy and Advisory Board member at the Global Digital Asset and Cryptocurrency Association.

 “Regardless of [a] CBN digital currency, we believe that cryptocurrencies will still have a place in Nigeria’s emerging digital economy due to their public and permissionless nature.”

So Nigeria’s digital currency could be a huge plus for crypto enthusiasts and demonstrates Nigeria’s interest in leveraging the benefits associated with adopting digital currencies “Early adopters will gain big advantages in the long run.

Nigeria along with other “non-aligned movement” and “second world” countries have an opportunity to leapfrog into what is thought of as the first world economy, said Mayande Walker, chief executive officer at OpenCryptoTrust, a blockchain developer.

“Smart early adopters can begin offering financial services and applications that are in line with what is clearly the future of money.

While bigger economies stumble past the complexity of adoption and change, Nigeria, Vietnam, Philippines, Turkey, Peru (along with Switzerland) can cut through to the future. Digital currencies make sense in all the ways that the fiat experiment has failed.”

This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice.

Nothing mentioned in this article constitutes any type of solicitation, recommendation, offer or endorsement to buy and sell any crypto asset. Trading in any financial market involves risk and can result in loss of funds.

Before investing any money, one should always conduct thorough research and seek professional advice.

• Binance is "not capable" of being effectively supervised, according to UK's financial regulator.
• The Financial Conduct Authority added that the crypto exchange poses a significant risk to investors.
• This comes after Binance failed to respond to queries by the regulator.
• Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, is "not capable" of being effectively supervised, according to the UK's financial regulator.

The Financial Conduct Authority in an 11-page notice published Wednesday said Binance Markets Limited, a London-based affiliate of Binance, failed to supply further information about its business model and wider product offerings, among other requests.

"This is of particular concern in the context of the firm's membership of a global group which offers complex and high-risk financial products, which pose a significant risk to consumers," the notice said.In response to the FCA's first inquiry into its business, Binance said:

"We do not consider these questions to be appropriate, or in any way relevant, to BML's application."

The cryptocurrency exchange added its website is operated outside of the UK and therefore does not fall under the country's regulations concerning money laundering, terrorist financing, and transfer of funds.

But the fact that Binance's main exchange is not UK-based is a problem for the watchdog because people living in the country can still trade cryptocurrency products that otherwise won't be allowed via Binance's broader platform.

"The FCA considers that the firm's responses to some questions amounted to a refusal to supply information, and that the firm has failed to respond adequately to the FCA's information requirements," the notice said.

Binance, which was founded in 2017, does not have a formal headquarters. While it was founded in China and officially domiciled in the Cayman Islands, the firm is mostly present online, something authorities have taken issue with.

The FCA in June banned Binance's UK-based marketplace from conducting activity without written consent and has issued a warning to potential investors, telling them to be "wary" of promises of big returns.

The watchdog also took issue with Binance's lack of approved senior officials and its stock tokens, which the exchange stopped offering just three months after launching them.

In recent months, Binance has been slapped with multiple warnings, and in some jurisdictions, has been banned from operating due to its failure to register with local regulators.

The company has faced scrutiny from Canada, Japan, Germany, Thailand, Italy, and the Cayman Islands, among others.In the US, Binance is reportedly under investigation by the Department of Justice the the IRS.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao in July said his firm will be "fully compliant" to protect its users.

FTX.US, the U.S. affiliate of crypto exchange FTX, has signed a $17.5 million, 10-year agreement with Cal Athletics, the athletic department of the University of California, Berkeley, for the naming rights to the field at California Memorial Stadium.

• The field will be known as the “FTX Field” at the California Memorial Stadium and is FTX.US’ first college-related cryptocurrency naming rights sponsorship. The Berkeley campus is the flagship campus of the University of California system.
• Cal Athletics’ multimedia rights holder Learfield will accept the payment in cryptocurrency on behalf of the university. 
• FTX has been on a sports and e-sports sponsorship spending spree this year. In March, the exchange secured the naming rights to the home arena of NBA team Miami Heat for a reported $135 million, while in June, the exchange paid $210 million to acquire the naming rights for e-sports organization TSM.
• The latest deal involves FTX featuring its branding on press backdrops and launching a platform with Cal Athletics to support philanthropic projects. 
• FTX has a connection to Cal Athletics through Chief Operating Officer Sina Nader, who is a Cal alumnus and was a walk-on member of the football team. "We're excited to partner with one of the world's great universities  and expand crypto's presence into the collegiate athletics landscape," Nader said in a press release.

U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) announced a compromise involving Democrats, Republicans and the Treasury Department over a contentious tax provision in the Senate’s infrastructure bill on Monday that would exempt crypto transaction validators from a broadened definition of “broker.

”The full text of the compromise was not immediately available, but Toomey said it would specify who has tax reporting obligations within the digital asset sector. Software developers, node operators and validators would not be required to carry or report transaction information, but brokers would be.

“We’re not proposing anything sweeping or anything radical – [the compromise] makes clear that a broker means only those persons that conduct transactions where consumers buy, sell and trade digital assets,” Toomey said in a press conference Monday.

Related: Senate Advances Infrastructure Bill Without Amending Crypto Provision

The text itself would define a broker as “any person who (for consideration) regularly effectuates transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person,” and would exclude entities that validate transactions (meaning miners or stakers) without providing other services, or entities that sell hardware or software that allow customers to control private keys, according to screenshots shared by Coin Center’s Jerry Brito.

However, the compromise comes after the Senate conducted a number of procedural votes late Sunday to advance the bill’s original text. Unless the Senate can achieve unanimous consent on the compromise before a final vote by Tuesday, the legislative body will send the original provision to the House of Representatives.

The bill, which has been held up repeatedly for a number of issues including the crypto provision, seeks to fund $1 trillion in both infrastructure maintenance and new initiatives like electric vehicle charging stations. Part of the bill expects to pay for these initiatives through $28 billion raised over the next 10 years through expanded crypto tax reporting requirements. 

However, the crypto industry pushed back against the wording of this provision amid concerns that the revised definition of a “broker” would capture miners or other types of validators, hardware manufacturers, software developers and other network participants that don’t have customers or otherwise any ability to comply with the information reporting rules.

Related: 2 Senators Propose Exemptions to Crypto Tax Reporting Required by US Infrastructure Bill

Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Lummis and Toomey introduced an amendment to exempt non-broker type entities from the legislation. Earlier on Monday, Wyden said, “I don’t believe the cryptocurrency amendment language on offer is good enough to protect privacy and security, but it’s certainly better than the underlying bill.

Majority Leader [Charles] Schumer says he won’t block a unanimous consent request on it.”Senators Ron Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) also introduced an amendment, which would only exempt validators from proof-of-work or proof-of-stake networks.

The White House previously announced its support for this amendment.All six senators support the new compromise, Toomey said.Crypto isn’t the only issue that held up passage of the overall infrastructure package.

Rather, it has been one of a handful.It was non-crypto issues that held up debate and votes on Sunday, according to multiple reporters in Washington, D.C.UPDATE (Aug. 9, 2021, 16:00 UTC): Adds text from the bill.

Key Points

• A $1 trillion infrastructure bill in the Senate proposes to raise $28 billion by taxing crypto transactions.
• This bill is likely to pass a Senate vote today or tomorrow.
• A new, powerful crypto lobby opposes reporting requirements in the bill and will continue fighting to limit them.

What happened
Cryptocurrency prices roared higher in Monday-morning trading, with Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) up 3.7% since midnight Sunday, Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) up 4.4%, and Dogecoin (CRYPTO:DOGE) doing best of all -- up 5.9% as of 10:45 a.m. EDT.And you may have Washington, D.C., to thank for it.


IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.

So what
For the past few weeks, cryptocurrency investors have been riveted by goings-on in the capital city, where the United States Senate is pondering passing a $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

The bill contains a provision designed to raise $28 billion by taxing cryptocurrency transactions, to help pay for all the new infrastructure.

As if that weren't bad enough, there's a serious argument over who, precisely, will be required to pay this tax after reporting their cryptocurrency transactions to the IRS.

Last week, Senate leaders such as Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania began trying to pass amendments to ensure that only actual "financial intermediaries" would be required to report crypto transactions under the definition of "brokers" subject to this requirement -- and that crypto miners, software developers, and transaction validators would not have to so report.

At last report, the infrastructure bill had passed a procedural vote without these amendments, and it is headed for a final vote on Monday or early Tuesday.  

Now what
Now, that all sounds pretty bad for cryptocurrency investors -- so why are Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum prices heading higher?Because, as Politico reports today, the real importance of what (almost) happened in the Senate last week isn't that the cryptocurrency lobby didn't (quite) win its battle over legislative language.

It's that it was able to provoke "an intense infrastructure bill brawl between Bitcoin advocates, Congress and the White House," proving that all of a sudden, cryptocurrency is "a new power player in Washington," and one that now has powerful allies on Capitol Hill.  

Plus, all is not lost in the battle over the definition of what constitutes a cryptocurrency "broker." The fight over this definition in the Senate has drawn in powerful allies outside Washington, ranging from public corporations to venture capital firms to Square (NYSE:SQ) boss Jack Dorsey, who on Sunday rallied his 5.6-million-follower Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) army to lobby legislators to fix the infrastructure bill's "'Crypto Tax Reporting' provision":

That lobby-army may have lost a battle in the Senate Sunday night, but as Politico points out, even if the infrastructure bill is passed as-is by the Senate, it still must survive a House vote and probably reconciliation between the two legislative bodies -- two more chances to get the "broker" definition tightened up.

With cryptocurrency now recognized as "more of a force than anybody ever anticipated," argues Politico, you shouldn't count the crypto lobby out just yet.

The chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has called on Congress to give the agency more authority to police cryptocurrency trading, lending and platforms, a “wild west” he said was riddled with fraud and investor risk.

Gary Gensler said on Tuesday that the crypto market involved many tokens that may be unregistered securities and left prices open to manipulation and millions of investors vulnerable to risks.

“This asset class is rife with fraud, scams and abuse in certain applications,” Gensler told a global conference.

“We need additional congressional authorities to prevent transactions, products and platforms from falling between regulatory cracks.“Cryptocurrencies reached a record capitalization of $2tn in April as more investors stocked their portfolios with digital tokens, but oversight of the market remains patchy.

The industry has been waiting with bated breath to see how Gensler, a Democratic appointee who took the SEC helm in April, will approach oversight of the market, which he has previously said should be brought within traditional financial regulation.

On Tuesday, Gensler provided more insight on his thinking, saying he would like Congress to give the SEC the power to oversee cryptocurrency exchanges.

He also called on lawmakers to give the SEC more power to oversee crypto lending and platforms like peer-to-peer decentralized finance (DeFi) sites that allow lenders and borrowers to transact in cryptocurrencies without traditional banks.

“If we don’t address these issues, I worry a lot of people will be hurt,” he said.The Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren has been pressing regulators to get a grip on the market, which she described in a July letter to Gensler as “highly opaque and volatile”.

Gensler responded by asking Congress to consider granting him more autonomy to regulate the sector.

On Tuesday, he also underscored that “stock tokens, a stable value token backed by securities, or any other virtual product that provides synthetic exposure to underlying securities ... are subject to the securities laws”.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler said he believes the vast majority of crypto tokens and initial coin offerings (ICOs) violate U.S. securities laws.

In a speech at the Aspen Security Forum on Tuesday, Gensler said he agreed with Jay Clayton, his predecessor at the SEC, who once famously said that in his view, “every ICO I’ve seen is a security.”

“Generally, folks buying these tokens are anticipating profits, and there’s a small group of entrepreneurs and technologists standing up and nurturing the projects,” Gensler said in prepared remarks.

“I believe we have a crypto market now where many tokens may be unregistered securities, without required disclosures or market oversight.”

Read more: 

SEC Boss Gensler Eyeing Robust Regulation of Crypto Market: Report


These tokens may allow markets to be manipulated, which in turn could harm investors, the regulator said.

Subscribe to State of Crypto, our weekly newsletter on policy impact.

By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms & conditions and privacy policy.

Gensler reiterated earlier comments that stock tokens and “stable value tokens backed by securities” qualify as securities in his view, meaning they must be registered and their issuers must abide by existing federal law.

“A typical trading platform has more than 50 tokens on it. In fact, many have well in excess of 100 tokens.

While each token’s legal status depends on its own facts and circumstances, the probability is quite remote that, with 50 or 100 tokens, any given platform has zero securities,” Gensler said.

Gensler also briefly hinted at how his agency might approach exchange-traded funds (ETFs). More than a dozen industry participants have filed applications to launch a bitcoin (BTC, -2.03%) ETF over the past year.

Gensler noted that investment vehicles with exposure to crypto, including mutual funds, already exist. While Gensler didn’t comment on the proposals themselves, he called out the importance of having investor protections codified into law.

“Given these important protections, I look forward to the staff’s review of such filings, particularly if those are limited to these CME-traded bitcoin futures,” he said, referring to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are known by the mainstream as digital assets that represent real-world objects such as art, music and fashion, among others.

Yet, while most of the world may be enamored by the high selling prices of NFTs launched by celebrities, athletes and other famous individuals, nonfungible tokens are starting to pique the interest of corporations for business use cases.

Enterprises embracing NFTs was a point discussed during the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, or EEA, anniversary event that took place virtually on July 29, 2021.

During a keynote session, entitled “The future of Ethereum and Web3,” Joe Lubin, CEO and founder of ConsenSys — a blockchain software company — mentioned that “NFTs are doing a tremendous job of getting enterprises excited.

”Following the EEA event, Lubin told Cointelegraph that from a broader perspective, NFTs have become a revolution that will transform how the software will be built and delivered:

“We’re now moving into a world where we have these nonfungible software objects that have unique identities that can actually accept money, pay money and can participate in governance, either in decentralized autonomous organizations or potentially other kinds of governments that can govern themselves.”

As such, Lubin believes that NFTs won’t just encapsulate content through digital artwork or music, but that nonfungible tokens will eventually evolve into entire businesses with their own rights.

The future of NFTs for enterprise use

Although Lubin is very much aware that self-governing NFTs will be a profound transformation, he explained that artists and content creators who have launched nonfungible tokens have already demonstrated that this technology is capable of solving common business problems:

“NFTs are enabling artists and content owners to recognize that their intellectual property can have different rights and different rates if they wish. These can then be monetized and sold to different people in really flexible and programmatic ways. It’s really about the artist not having to sell their soul to make a living, which is really exciting from the enterprise perspective.”

Specifically speaking, Lubin remarked that every media company in the world is thinking about or is already in the process of launching its own NFT platform.

To Lubin’s point, Media Publishares — publishers of Vogue, Esquire and other major magazines — announced a partnership earlier this year with decentralized ad network Vidy to launch and develop an NFT platform for the fashion, art and music industries.

Media Publishares’s nonfungible platform is expected to launch in Q3 of 2021 to enable a virtual environment to showcase digital art, fashion, music and design. The platform will also support the minting, trading and auctioning of NFTs through a tokenized system.

Yet, NFTs are not only poised to disrupt the media industry. Lubin added that traditional financial service sectors shifting toward decentralized finance (DeFi) concepts will also leverage nonfungible tokens.

According to Lubin, NFTs are going to be a major part of DeFi going forward since the traditional financial world consists of fungible token shares, deeds and other financial instruments that are uniquely associated with an asset.

This being the case, Lubin explained that a “nonfungible financial world” is a massive opportunity that will likely be centered around automated market makers, stable coin systems and lending/borrowing protocols:

“These will look very similar to fungible tokens, but they’ll need to be built somewhat uniquely to accommodate nonfungible tokens."Based on this, it’s important to point out that enterprises leveraging a nonfungible financial world will, in turn, solve a major business problem: ensuring that invoices are paid.

Dan Burnett, executive director of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, told Cointelegraph that just as computers and the internet have helped companies lower costs and increase speeds, Ethereum and blockchain technology are enabling trust for how people will get compensated:

“The whole point of blockchain technology is that we don't need a trusted human for business processes. Organizations can now set things up not only for how people get paid now, but how people can get paid in perpetuity.”

Shifting from corporations to community

As enterprises begin to apply nonfungible concepts to traditional business models, Lubin further remarked that this demonstrates a shift from an age of corporations to an age of community: “DeFi protocols are about sharing governance.

We are going to eventually organize all our business activities in decentralized autonomous organizations.”Lubin noted that the billion-dollar gaming sector is already demonstrating how NFTs can impact real-world economies.

For instance, Lubin mentioned the Ethereum-enabled blockchain project Axie Infinity, which allows players to earn income through nonfungible tokens. In particular, Axie Infinity has had an impact in the Philippines, a region hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Related: The ethics of hiring cheap Filipino staff: Crypto in the Philippines


The play-to-earn blockchain-based video game has already allowed several Filipino people to earn NFTs and cryptocurrencies by breeding, battling and trading digital pets called Axies. Lubin explained:

“Many of the 350,000 to 400,000 people that are playing the game are living in the Philippines. They are earning income that’s five times what they would be making at minimum wage. They’ve built a real economy and are building a metaverse with property. This is a phenomenon to watch.”

Recent data from Axie World shows that the Axie Infinity virtual environments have a total revenue close to $120 million in July 2021, which is up significantly from the $1.92 million seen at the beginning of this year.

Although impressive, Burnett pointed out that proper regulations are still required in order for nonfungible systems for enterprises to come into fruition: 

“One of our goals at the EEA is to work with regulators to ensure a proper engagement.

This isn’t about shutting down the technology or community, but rather about understanding that the world has changed.

”While regulations are still underway, Lubin optimistically remarked that “the enterprise herd is already coming to the Ethereum mainnet.”

 Business analytics firm MicroStrategy, which owns more bitcoin than any other corporation in the world, posted its biggest loss ever Thursday as a result of the cryptocurrency's massive crash last quarter, but the company's longtime CEO Michael Saylor said the company will continuing buying more of the volatile asset amid strong support from institutional investors.

Longtime CEO Michael Saylor said MicroStrategy intends to continue buying more bitcoin despite its ... [+] GETTY IMAGES

KEY FACTS

In an after-market release Thursday, Virginia-based MicroStrategy reported a second-quarter loss of $299.3 million, compared to a $3 million profit in last year's second quarter, on approximately $125 million in sales, up 13.4% from a year earlier.

Fueling its overall losses, the company disclosed a $424.8 million impairment loss due to the declining value of its bitcoin holdings in the quarter, during which the cryptocurrency's prices plummeted 40%. 

The impairment loss reflects a decline in bitcoin’s carrying value, but it can effectively be recouped if prices recover—not out of the question given the coin’s volatility and past resurgence.

In a statement alongside earnings, Saylor touted the company's successful debt offering in June, after which the firm purchased an additional 13,005 bitcoins for $489 million in cash.

As of June 30, MicroStrategy owns about 105,085 bitcoins, worth nearly $4.2 billion based on Thursday prices of about $39,760.

SURPRISING FACT 

Last month, MicroStrategy raised a greater-than-expected $500 million through the sale of bonds in order to acquire more of the world's largest cryptocurrency. In a sign of massive interest from institutional investors, the company received more than $1.5 billion in orders for the offering, which was announced while bitcoin prices were at a one-month low of about $33,400.

CRUCIAL QUOTE 

“We continue to be pleased by the results of the implementation of our digital asset strategy," Saylor said Thursday, noting the company's latest capital raise and adding: "Going forward, we intend to continue to deploy additional capital into our digital asset strategy.”

KEY BACKGROUND

Given its outsized crypto investment, MicroStrategy's stock tends to ride bitcoin's incredibly volatile price wave. Shares have plunged more than 50% since February, when bitcoin sank after Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a vocal crypto supporter who's fueled volatility in the space this year, said prices seemed “a little high.

” The cryptocurrency is down about 30% over the same period, but like MicroStrategy, whose stock has skyrocketed 410%, its prices have surged 260% over the past year.

MicroStrategy's second-quarter loss is its greatest since the dot-com era in 2000, when the data-mining company posted a third-quarter loss of $168 million. That year, the stock soared nearly 2,500% before plunging more than 95% when the broader market crashed.

TANGENT

MicroStrategy owns more bitcoin than any publicly traded company, but in its namesake bitcoin fund, investment manager Grayscale owns 654,885 tokens—worth more than $26 billion on Thursday.



Jonathan Ponciano

I'm a reporter at Forbes focusing on markets and finance. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I double-majored in business journalism… Read More

A report from City A.M. alleged that an anonymous insider at Amazon had news that it would start to accept Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by the end of the year. This rumor quickly spread across news sites and social media.

Amazon has since denied the rumors via an email statement to Bloomberg.  Amazon denied the report from City A.M., according to Zero Hedge.

It added that it has no plans to launch a crypto by 2022 and will not accept Bitcoin this year but that it will continue to explore cryptocurrencies and blockchain. 

“Notwithstanding our interest in the space, the speculation that has ensued around our specific plans for cryptocurrencies is not true. We remain focused on exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on Amazon," said the Amazon spokesperson.

City A.M.'s source said that Amazon had a fully-fledged plan to allow crypto payments and that it would be an integral part of the company going forward. 

"This isn’t just going through the motions to set up cryptocurrency payment solutions at some point in the future – this is a full-on, well-discussed, integral part of the future mechanism of how Amazon will work," said the source. 

Don’t miss out on how smart money is playing the crypto game. Subscribe to our premium newsletter - Crypto Investor.

The source even said that this project had come down from Jeff Bezos himself.“It begins with Bitcoin – this is the key first stage of this crypto project, and the directive is coming from the very top… Jeff Bezos himself.

”The Amazon insider said that the company was looking to add far more than just Bitcoin and that they have been working on this since 2019. “Ethereum, Cardano and Bitcoin Cash will be next in line before they bring about eight of the most popular cryptocurrencies online. 

It won’t take long because the plans are already there, and they have been working on them since 2019. This entire project is pretty much ready to roll.

”The source also added that Amazon is looking to develop its own native token after all the big cryptos are integrated. “When all these crypto ducks are lined up, there’s another twist to push things even further into Amazon’s favor – a native token," explained the source. 

Amazon starting to accept Bitcoin and even going as far as to make its own token lit the crypto community on fire and Bitcoin pumped nearly 11% on the day, only to drop back down after it denied the rumors.

This is the second time Amazon has been in the news for cryptocurrency in the last week.

The company caused a stir last week after it published a new job listing for a digital currency and blockchain product lead that would "own the vision and strategy for Amazon’s Digital Currency and Blockchain strategy and product roadmap.

"While Amazon has apparently denied the reports from the City A.M. insider, the company's new job listing shows that it does have some level of interest in cryptocurrency or blockchain. This story is developing.

Bitcoin is again trading below $30,000 as another cryptocurrency company runs into regulatory trouble—the latest headwind to hit the digital-asset market.

New Jersey’s Bureau of Securities issued a cease-and-desist order against BlockFi, a crypto trading and lending company, demanding that it stop offering interest-bearing accounts and cease taking new customers in New Jersey, as of Thursday.

BlockFi has been funding its trading and lending businesses, in part, “through the sale of unregistered securities in violation of the Securities Law,” the state’s attorney general, Andrew Bruck, said in a release.

“No one gets a free pass simply because they’re operating in the fast-evolving cryptocurrency market.” BlockFi CEO Zac Prince said in a tweet that its accounts “are lawful and appropriate for crypto market participants.

” He added that a BlockFi interest-bearing account isn’t a security. BlockFi remains fully operational for existing clients in New Jersey, he added.

“We will continue to engage with all relevant authorities to protect our clients’ interests and ensure that our products remain available,” he said.

The state’s order targets BlockFi’s high-yielding crypto accounts. Investors can buy a currency such as Bitcoin and deposit it in a BlockFi account where it earns interest, paid monthly in crypto, well above yields on traditional bank or brokerage deposits.

BlockFi pools the deposits to fund its lending operations and proprietary trading.

BlockFi is now paying 4% on up to 0.25% of one Bitcoin (BTC), worth about $7,500 at recent prices of $29,875 for the token.

Other tokens offer higher yields: USD Coin (USDC) pays 7.5% while MakerDao (DAI) is at 8%.

BlockFi has raised at least $14.7 billion worldwide through these accounts, according to the release, but the company may be in violation of state securities law.

BlockFi’s accounts aren’t registered as securities or bank accounts under state law, nor are they exempt from regulation, New Jersey’s officials said. While BlockFi says it is a regulated entity, it hasn’t disclosed that its accounts aren’t registered, violating state disclosure rules, according to the state’s order.

Unlike bank or brokerage accounts, which are insured for up to $250,000 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., or for up to $500,000 by the Securities Investor Protection Corp., crypto- accounts may have no such protections.

 BlockFi isn’t offering its accounts to New York state residents and those in other states, New Jersey’s officials pointed out, “presumably because of the laws in those jurisdictions.

”The broader thrust is that regulators may be homing in on such high-yielding crypto accounts and the broader sphere of decentralized finance, or DeFi, platforms.

Those networks are proliferating across the financial and tech sectors.

DeFi uses blockchain technology to create platforms and applications for digital tokens and transactions. It is a rapidly expanding field, including exchanges, stablecoins, and lending platforms like BlockFi. Scores of new digital tokens are popping up on DeFi networks.

But regulatory supervision is a gray area. In New Jersey, the state now appears to view the high-yielding crypto accounts as securities, which could subject them to additional regulations and disclosure rules.

Many companies are now building DeFi platforms, aiming to get into crypto-lending, trading, and other services. 

Square (ticker: SQ) CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted last week that the company plans to build out a DeFi network, “to create non-custodial, permission-less, and decentralized financial service.

”Grayscale Investments, one of the largest digital asset managers with $31 billion under management, launched a DeFi fund on July 14. The fund, available to high-net-worth investors with a $50,000 minimum investment, consists of a pool of digital tokens running on various DeFi networks.

Its largest holding is a token called Uniswap, at 50% of the fund, followed by Compound, MakerDao, and Synthetix Network.

Early investors may not be pleased. The fund is charging a 2.5% annual management fee, and It is down 9.2% since launching last week.

Write to Daren Fonda at [email protected]

In 2005, Banksy acquired a piece of Israel’s West Bank Barrier and used it for a “treasure hunt.” The first person to find the rock and email him with the secret word he wrote on it—”Spike”—would get to keep the work.

The piece, titled Spike, was found in Palestine and has since traded hands a few times. Now, it is heading to auction—not as a physical object but as an NFT.Valuart, a new NFT platform, launched with the auction of Spike on July 22. Bidding will continue until July 30 online.

Notably, the elusive street artist artist is not involved in the minting or sale of the work. Instead, the Italian opera singer Vittorio Grigolo, who owns Spike and cofounded Valuart, was the one who worked with the platform to create the NFT.

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The NFT features a CGI rendering of Spike slowly spinning in the long light of a sunset. It appears to twirl over mountains and water as Grigolo sings the Puccini aria “E lucevan le stelle.

” The buyer of the NFT will also receive certain extra perks, including a trip for the buyer and guest to see the physical Spike in Switzerland, as well as a dinner with Grigolo and his other Valuart cofounders, Etan Genini and Michele Fiscalini.

At time of publication, the highest bid was 1.5 Ethereum, or around $3,500—a disappointing start for an NFT related to work by such a well-known artist. But Genini is hopeful that bids will roll in later on.

“It seems that they’re waiting right to the last hour in order to start bidding,” Genini told ARTnews.Some have raised legal concerns about the Spike NFT.

Copyright lawyer Jeff Gluck of CXIP Labs claimed that Banksy might have grounds to sue because he wasn’t involved.

“If Banksy has not given his permission for this NFT, then it could appear to be unauthorized and illegitimate,” Gluck said in a statement.

“The rights to create an NFT of an artwork are held by the creator, the copyright holder—not the person who possesses the artwork.”Genini claimed that Valuart “did not copy” the work because the platform “re-elaborated on property we own.

” He added, “We are not taking the piece of art making a digital copy. We digitized the property we own and the NFT is an installation as a CGI video production that we’ve worked with artists to create.

”Banksy, whose true identity remains unknown, tends to comment on his work on social media. Thus far, he has not posted about the Valuart sale.

Fifty percent of the realized price will be donated to different charities that help those who have endured violent conflicts. The first charity to receive donations will be Doctors Without Borders, which operates in Palestinian territories.

Spike was not the first time Banksy addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has been working in the region for nearly 20 years now, having painted a mural in occupied Palestinian territories in 2003.

In 2011, Banksy encouraged graffiti artists from around the world to tag the West Bank Barrier, telling the Independent in 2011, “If you like dancing you go on holiday to Ibiza, if you like walls you go to Palestine.” In 2015, he made a fake promotional video for Palestinian tourism, citing the lovely views and showing rubble.

Text reading “The locals love it so much they never leave (because they’re not allowed to)” was interspersed with images of graffiti that Banksy placed around Bethlehem.

And in 2017, he founded the Walled Off Hotel (complete with a gift shop!) near the West Bank Barrier, which was billed as having “the worst view in the world.”

A US probe into Tether is homing in on whether executives behind the digital token committed bank fraud, a potential criminal case that would have broad implications for the cryptocurrency market.

Tether’s pivotal role in the crypto ecosystem is now well known because the token is widely used to trade Bitcoin. But the Justice Department investigation is focused on conduct that occurred years ago, when Tether was in its more nascent stages.

Specifically, federal prosecutors are scrutinising whether Tether concealed from banks that transactions were linked to crypto, said three people with direct knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the probe is confidential.


Criminal charges would mark one of the most significant developments in the US government’s crackdown on virtual currencies. That’s because Tether is by far the most popular stablecoin — tokens designed to be immune to wild price swings, making them ideal for buying and selling more volatile coins.


The token’s importance to the market is clear: Tethers in circulation are worth about $62 billion and they underpin more than half of all Bitcoin trades.

“Tether routinely has open dialogue with law enforcement agencies, including the DOJ, as part of our commitment to cooperation and transparency,” the company said in a statement.

Its corporate structure consists of a tangled web of entities based in the British Virgin Islands and Hong Kong.

The Justice Department declined to comment.Federal prosecutors have been circling Tether since at least 2018. In recent months, they sent letters to individuals alerting them that they’re targets of the investigation, one of the people said.

The notices signal that a decision on whether to bring a case could be made soon, with senior Justice Department officials ultimately determining whether charges are warranted.

The probe is reaching a tipping point as stablecoins attract intense scrutiny from regulators.

The US Treasury Department and Federal Reserve are among agencies concerned that the tokens could threaten financial stability, and are obscuring transactions tied to money laundering and other misconduct because they allow criminals to make payments without going through the regulated banking system.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last week that watchdogs must “act quickly” in considering new rules for stablecoins.



A hallmark of Tether is that its creators have said each token is backed by one US dollar, either through actual money or holdings that include commercial paper, corporate bonds and precious metals.

That has triggered concerns that if lots of traders sold stable coins all at once, there could be a run on assets backstopping the tokens. Fitch Ratings has warned that such a scenario could destabilise short-term credit markets.

Tether was first issued in 2014 as a solution to a problem plaguing the crypto market: banks didn’t want to open accounts for virtual-currency exchanges because they feared touching funds tied to drug trafficking, cyberattacks and terrorism.

By accepting Tether, exchanges could give traders a way to park their balances without being exposed to Bitcoin’s price gyrations. And funds could be transferred instantaneously from exchange to exchange.

But Tether’s corporate side still needed banks to hold its money and process customer transactions. One early relationship that soured was with Wells Fargo & Co. In 2017, the Tether Ltd. affiliate and Bitfinex — a crypto exchange with common owners and executives — sued Wells Fargo for blocking wire transfers that had been sought through Taiwanese banks.

In the lawsuit, Tether Ltd. and Bitfinex said Wells Fargo knew, or should have known, that the transactions were being used to obtain US dollars so clients could purchase digital tokens. The companies dropped the case shortly after filing it.

Wells Fargo declined to comment.In the course of its years-long investigation, the Justice Department has examined whether traders used Tether tokens to illegally drive up Bitcoin during an epic rally for cryptocurrencies in 2017.

While it’s unclear whether Tether the company was a target of that earlier review, the current focus on bank fraud suggests prosecutors may have moved on from pursuing a case tied to market manipulation.

Tether has already drawn the ire of regulators.

In February, Bitfinex and several Tether affiliates agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle claims from New York Attorney General Letitia James that the firms hid losses and lied that each token was supported by one US dollar.

The companies had no access to banking in 2017, making it impossible that they had reserves backing the tokens, James said.

The firms settled without admitting or denying the allegations.

© 2021 Bloomberg

Man Group CEO Luke Ellis compared crypto to tulip bulbs, saying it has “no inherent worth whatsoever.”

• Ellis described crypto as "a pure trading instrument" in an interview with the Financial Times published Monday.
• "There is no inherent worth in it whatsoever. It's a tulip bulb," he said, recycling the oft-used comparison of crypto to the Dutch "tulipmania" market bubble in the 17th century.
• Man Group, the world's largest publicly listed hedge fund company, does however trade crypto, using quantitative analysis to sniff out price anomalies that can prove profitable.
• "We like to be long and short depending on what the models say is likely to happen to the market and we will trade it long and short just as happily and in as big a size as market liquidity lets you trade," Ellis said.
• Ellis has previously called bitcoin (BTC, +9.37%) a trading instrument rather than a long-term asset allocation.
• "We trade around it and try and to provide some liquidity into the market," he told CNBC in March.

Binance is set to stop its crypto margin trading involving sterling, the euro and Australian dollar, as the world’s large cryptocurrency exchange seeks to stave off a widespread regulatory backlash against some of its services.

• Starting Aug. 10, Binance Margin will suspend borrowing for its GBP, EUR and AUD pairs and major cryptocurrencies including bitcoin (BTC, +9.63%), ether (ETH, +4.86%) and Binance coin, an announcement Monday said.
• Binance will conduct automatic settlement, cancel pending orders and delist all affected pairs by Aug. 12.
• The announcement comes only hours after CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that Binance was reducing the maximum leverage users can use to trade futures contracts from 100x to 20x, following the lead of fellow exchange FTX.
• Binance has been the target of a string of warnings and denouncements from financial regulators the world over in recent weeks, including those of the U.K., Japan, Italy and Thailand.
• Less than a fortnight ago, the exchange said it was ending support for its stock market token offering that had drawn consternation from several financial watchdogs.

Global health experts have condemned Boris Johnson’s lifting of most Covid-19 legal restrictions in England on Monday as “a threat to the world”, as daily case numbers in the UK rose to more than 50,000.


 The UK now has the third highest number of cases of any country in the world — only Indonesia and Brazil have more — and some scientists fear it could become a breeding ground for new Covid variants.


 Ministers have warned that daily cases could soon hit 100,000 and have in recent days shown growing signs of nerves as July 19 — described by tabloid newspapers as “Freedom Day” — approaches.


 Health secretary Sajid Javid declared this month that there was “no going back”, but now ministers admit restrictions may have to be reintroduced as they brace themselves for a huge spike in cases.


 “Of course if we get into a situation where it’s unacceptable and we do need to put back further restrictions then that of course is something the government will look at,” Lucy Frazer, solicitor-general, told Sky News.


 As the UK reported 51,870 cases — the highest figure since January 15 — global scientists at an “emergency international summit” urged the Johnson government to “urgently reconsider its proposed actions”.


 The online event, organised by UK scientists opposed to ending the restrictions, attracted current and former government advisers from New Zealand, Italy, Israel, South Africa, Australia and Taiwan.


 They signed a declaration saying Johnson’s decision would have “a profoundly damaging impact in England” and added:

“The UK is one of the world’s leading travel hubs — any variant that becomes dominant there is likely to spread to the rest of the world.

”

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Stephen Duckett, former secretary of Australia’s health department, said:

“There is no reputable public health adviser of any kind who would recommend opening up at a time when the virus is spreading rapidly.

”

British officials say Johnson will not retreat at the last minute. Nightclubs will reopen on July 19, limits on social gatherings will end and people will no longer be legally required to wear masks in crowded places.


 Chris Whitty, chief medical officer, has argued that it is better for England to suffer a Covid wave in the summer — when health systems are under less pressure and schools are off — than in the winter.


 Johnson, who has been under intense pressure from Tory MPs to end Covid restrictions, also believes that the country’s “defensive wall” will be reinforced over the summer as more people are vaccinated and infected people — particularly the young — develop antibodies.


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But in recent days the government’s once bullish tone has evaporated. Where ministers once boasted about throwing away their masks, Johnson is now urging people to exercise “extreme caution”.


 Some fear the Covid “wave” that Whitty is prepared to see wash over England over the summer could become a tsunami, despite the fact that the link between cases and hospitalisations has been severely weakened.

Whitty said on Thursday, referring to individual hospitals:

“I don’t think we should underestimate the fact that we could get into trouble again surprisingly fast.”

Grant Shapps, transport secretary, said he “wanted” Sadiq Khan, London mayor, to require mask-wearing on public transport in the capital, even though the government has scrapped the legal requirement to do so.


 Meanwhile Covid certificates, which only weeks ago were being dismissed by ministers as unnecessary, are now being recommended for use at nightclubs and other venues.


 Bosses complain that they are being confronted with difficult legal issues over what to expect from customers and staff, as Johnson shifts responsibility for fighting Covid to the businesses and individuals.


 Meanwhile companies and public services are being disrupted as hundreds of thousands of staff are “pinged” by the NHS Covid-19 app and told to self-isolate after coming into contact with someone with the virus.

 The prime minister is now caught in a political vice, with Tory MPs and rightwing newspapers urging him to strike out for “freedom”, while public opinion wants him to be far more cautious.


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Mark Harper, chair of the lockdown-sceptic Covid Recovery Group, said Whitty was right to say that the country had to learn to live with the virus and that it was right to trust the public “to balance the risks of life”.


 He criticised the chaotic government messaging of the past week, suggesting it smacked of the description by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former adviser, of a prime minister veering unpredictably on policy issues.


 “The government must govern in a way that avoids giving credence to the ‘shopping trolley’ critiques of the PM’s former senior adviser,” Harper told the Financial Times.


 Meanwhile senior Tories admit that opinion polling on Johnson’s policy is “very bad”, highlighting the political risk to the prime minister if it starts to unravel.


 An Ipsos Mori poll this week found that four in 10 adults supported compulsory face masks in public indefinitely, while a third of workers were “uncomfortable” about returning to the office. A quarter thought nightclubs should never reopen.

Bitcoin and crypto trading has undoubtedly affected many negatively. From a psychological perspective, it’s easy to predict the volatility of this field can lead someone into a storm of stress and anxiety.

Just the fact that this industry operates 24 hours a day will encourage dysfunctional behaviors such as compulsive price checking, losing sleep or obsessive thoughts about the market.

Even the most sophisticated investors are not prepared for the intense fluctuations in crypto, and so it’s no surprise this industry has now claimed its piece of the pie in mental health disorders.

Patty Fiore is a psychotherapist at Next Step Counseling who specializes in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and EMDR to treat trauma, depression and anxiety.

As a psychotherapist, I’m treating clients who are suffering from anxiety regardless of the position of their trades. Whether their portfolio is up or down, they are stressed over what decision to make next.

When the crypto market is up and investors experience a sudden increase in wealth, celebratory drug and alcohol abuse often follows. When the price of bitcoin and other crypto currencies drop, investors experience anxiety, major depression, PTSD and panic attacks.

Clinically speaking, some of these clients are traumatized and their mental health disorders are affecting their overall physical health. 

One can easily draw parallels between crypto trading and compulsive gambling. The constant ups and downs of the market create euphoric highs of winning and depressive downs of losing. 

Just like a synthetic drug, chasing the high is the goal. In a quest to make more money, one often falls into compulsive buying and selling and then finds it impossible to recover from the losses.

The inability to stop trading in a down market affects one’s stress level, self esteem, overall confidence and financial security. 

Just as cigarette packages warn smokers about the hazards of smoking, crypto exchange companies owe it to their users to alert investors of the psychological dangers of compulsive gambling.

Read more: Addicted to Crypto?

Sadly, there are very few who seek help or therapy as a tool to manage their investing-induced anxiety. In the worst scenarios this could be deadly. Alex Kearns, a 20-year old Robinhood user, took his life after mistakenly believing he lost a $730,000 risky bet.

The emotional roller coaster of trading is not for everyone and platforms such as Robinhood have not taken enough precautions to vet their users’ financial experience.

Whether you are trading stocks or crypto, it’s imperative to learn how to handle the emotional stress that automatically comes with the market. Mental health professionals can facilitate a safe space to create appropriate boundaries and build healthy coping mechanisms. 

Like any industry, psychotherapists also need to evolve to understand quickly evolving industries like tech and crypto, and to encourage clients to bring those issues to their sessions.

Therapists who understand these dynamic industries are more equipped to conceptualize their clients’ needs and process their feelings and decisions in a more efficient manner. 

Read more: 15 Ways to Stay Sane While Trading CryptoSeeking professional help should not only be normalized but encouraged – by Fortune 500 companies and crypto startups alike.

Today’s professionals spend more time at work than they do at home, and going to a therapist is the best place to process work frustrations. Addressing interpersonal disagreements will help strengthen co-worker bonds, increase work satisfaction and productivity. 

If you are having thoughts of suicide, the following organizations can help:

In the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text TALK to 741741. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for more information.

In Britain, call Papyrus at +44 800 068 4141, or text Young Minds to 85258. A list of additional resources on is found at Mind.org.

McAfee’s extradition to the US on tax charges had been approved hours earlier.

The antivirus software entrepreneur John McAfee has been found dead in his cell in Spain, hours after the country’s highest court approved his extradition to the United States, where he was wanted on tax-related criminal charges that carry a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

Catalan’s regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, confirmed a report in El País that McAfee, 75, had been found dead in the Brians 2 prison near Barcelona, late on Wednesday.In a statement, the Catalan justice department said that prison officers and medics had tried to save the life of a 75-year-old man but had been unsuccessful.

After attempts to save him failed, he was pronounced dead.“Judicial staff have been dispatched to the prison and are investigating the causes of death,” the statement said, adding: “Everything points to death by suicide.”McAfee’s lawyer on Wednesday told the Reuters news agency that McAfee had apparently hanged himself in his prison cell.

Tax offenses

McAfee, the creator of the McAfee virus software , was arrested last October at Barcelona’s international airport as he was about to board a flight to Istanbul. At that time, a judge ordered that McAfee should be held in jail while awaiting the outcome of a hearing on extradition.

The arrest of the entrepreneur came a day after authorities had made public a US indictment stemming from his tax offense. 

Tennessee prosecutors had charged McAfee with evading taxes after failing to report income made from promoting cryptocurrencies while he did consultancy work, as well as income from speaking engagements and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary.

On Wednesday, Spain’s highest court had approved McAfee’s extradition to the United States, although the decision could be appealed and his final extradition would have had to be approved by the Spanish cabinet.

“The court agrees to grant the extradition of John David McAfee as requested by the American judicial authorities for the crimes referred to in the tax offense indictments for years 2016 to 2018,” read the 16-page ruling.

The ruling also made clear that the US charges referred to the three fiscal years from 2016 to 2018.In a hearing held via videolink earlier this month, McAfee had argued that the charges against him were politically motivated and said he would spend the rest of his life in prison if he was returned to the US.

Erratic behavior

Since making a fortune with his eponymous antivirus software in the 1980s that still bears his name, McAfee had engaged in increasingly erratic behavior, most recently as a self-styled cryptocurrency guru claiming to make $2,000 a day.In recent years, his personal life had drawn as much interest as his professional achievements.

He became the subject of frenzied media scrutiny following the unsolved 2012 murder of a neighbour in Belize. McAfee said he knew nothing about the murder, but was worried he may have been the attacker’s intended target.

When the police found him living with a 17-year-old girl and discovered a large arsenal of weapons in his home in the Central American country, McAfee disappeared on a month-long flight that drew breathless media coverage.

The dead neighbour’s family later filed a wrongful death suit against McAfee and last year a court in Florida found against him, ordering him to pay the family more than $25m.

In 2015, McAfee was arrested in the US for driving under the influence and possession of a gun while under the influence.In July 2019, he was released from detention in the Dominican Republic after he and five others were suspected of travelling on a yacht carrying high-calibre weapons, ammunition and military-style gear, officials in the Caribbean island said at the time.

In March, he was charged in a Manhattan federal court over a pump and dump scheme involving cryptocurrencies he was promoting to his large social media following.In a tweet on 16 June, he said the US authorities believed he had “hidden crypto. I wish I did,” he said.“My remaining assets are all seized.

My friends evaporated through fear of association. I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing.”

• In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

While the short-term market outlook for many NFT projects look uncertain, and multiple new releases struggle to gain traction, one gardening-themed drop may have set some records by selling 8,888 nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in just under an hour.

Nonfungible token studio Zenft released a line of 8,888 unique bonzai NFT plants that quickly sold out on Tuesday, with the studio selling each digital tree for 0.08 Ether (ETH), or roughly $220 at the time of publication.

The bonsais have augmented reality/virtual reality functionality, and their 3D design is a step up from previous pixelated, 2D projects. The studio celebrated the nearly $2,000,000 sale with a tweet:

The success is somewhat of a surprise, given that NFTs remain mired in a slump following explosive growth earlier this year. New drops like Crypteriors struggle to sell out completely, making the one-hour mark a particular feat.However, some collectors suspect that the success may be due in part to clever marketing.

“I like the way they look but it feels like people are trying to recreate what happened with the Bored Apes money printing machine,” said one prominent collector who spoke to Cointelegraph on the condition of anonymity. “Been feeling a little exhausted seeing the space devolve into celeb pump and dump.

”Bored Ape Yacht Club, another recent success amid the market dip, managed to attract a fervent community in part on the back of outreach to prominent investors and collectors in the NFT space — and as one collector put it, where whales go, smaller collectors, or “plankton,” follow (sometimes to their detriment).

In an interview with Cointelegraph, “8ncient Gardener,” one of the three Zenft “gardeners” (or developers), said that marketing played a role — 8ncient “took painstaking care around crafting our giveaways,” in particular — but ultimately, the quality of the art is what made the bonsais such a hit. “I think our art speaks for itself quite honestly.

And everyone can unify around a bonsai. We had Apes, Punks, Voxo, Sandbox, Camels — all these NFT factions all rallying around bonsai,” he said. “In a world of pixel art we made gorgeous 3D bonsai.”

The on-chain evidence is somewhat mixed. There are currently 1,736 different holders of the nearly 9,000 bonsais, with over 22% of the supply concentrated in two NFT whale addresses.

From there, there’s a steep drop-off, however, with a broad range of addresses holding smaller quantities of the bonsais.While it’s impossible to tell the exact source of the success, Zenft “Grove Councilor” “Justsomebonzai” argued that the digital trees are ultimately spreading joy:

“People genuinely like Bonsai, they're beautiful IRL and they're beautiful as an NFT.”

The regulator has suggested that a dedicated market regulator would offer some protection against fraud and manipulation.

DeFi and crypto lending may pose issues for investors, SEC Chair Gary Gensler said.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) could pose fresh challenges for U.S. investors, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler said Wednesday.

The cryptocurrency sector poses various risks to investors in the markets and challenges to the securities regulator, Gensler said in prepared testimony before the House Appropriations Committee. He pointed to volatility in the market and novel products as some examples of these issues.

“Crypto lending platforms and so-called decentralized finance (‘DeFi’) platforms raise a number of challenges for investors and the SEC staff trying to protect them,” Gensler said.

SEC Chairman Gensler: SEC Should Be ‘Ready to Bring Cases’ Involving Crypto

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chief Gary Gensler said Thursday federal financial regulators should “be ready to bring cases” against bad actors in crypto and other emerging technologies. “The Hash” team weighs in.
 The crypto market had an overall market capitalization of $1.6 trillion on Monday after losing over one-third of its value in under two weeks, he said. While bitcoin (BTC, +1.51%) grabs most headlines, he noted that more than 80 tokens have a $1 billion market cap, while more than 1,500 had a market cap of over $1 million.

Gensler previously told the House Financial Services Committee that stronger regulation around crypto exchanges could help protect investors. In particular, he suggested a dedicated market regulator for the crypto markets would provide some protection around fraud and manipulation, two concerns the SEC has often cited in rejecting bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications.The regulator repeated the concern on Wednesday.

“Tokens currently on the market that are securities may be offered, sold, and traded in non-compliance with the federal securities laws. Furthermore, none of the exchanges trading crypto tokens has registered yet as an exchange with the SEC.

Altogether, this has led to substantially less investor protection than in our traditional securities markets, and to correspondingly greater opportunities for fraud and manipulation,” he said.

Read more: BlockFi Botches Promo With Outsized Bitcoin Reward Payments

Even the crypto market’s current volatility is suspect, Gensler seemed to say.“In recent weeks, the reported trading volume has ranged from $130 billion to $330 billion per day.

These figures, however, are not audited or reported to regulatory authorities, as the tokens are traded on unregistered crypto exchanges. That is just one of many regulatory gaps in these crypto asset markets,” Gensler said.

He also indicated that the SEC would be willing to bring enforcement actions against parties that don’t comply with federal securities laws.

The regulatory agency has already brought 75 such actions, and “has been consistent” in how it describes its approach, he said. He said the SEC “should be ready” to bring further actions in a speech to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority last week.

• Traders taking excessive risk in the bitcoin market being forced to sell when the price goes down were the bigger culprits for last week’s 30% drop in bitcoin prices, according to analysts.
• Bitcoin traders liquidated roughly $12 billion in levered positions last week as the price of the cryptocurrency spiraled, according to bybt.com, a cryptocurrency futures trading platform.
• “Selling begets more selling until you come to an equilibrium on leverage in the system,” says JMP’s Devin Ryan.

Slow Ventures’ Jill Carlson on fears surrounding bitcoin mining councilBitcoin’s aggressive moves are being driven by much more than the next China crackdown or Elon Musk headline.

Traders taking excessive risk in the unregulated cryptocurrency market being forced to sell when prices go down were in large part responsible for last week’s 30% drop in prices and outages for major exchanges, according to analysts.

A burgeoning bitcoin lending market is also adding to the volatility.The price of cryptocurrencies tanked last week, with bitcoin losing roughly a third of its value in a matter of hours. Bitcoin popped to nearly $40,000 on Monday but is still down about 33% from its high.



When traders use margin, they essentially borrow from their brokerage firm to take a bigger position in bitcoin. If prices go down, they have to pay the brokerage firm back in what’s known as a “margin call.

” As part of that, there’s often a set price that triggers selling in order to make sure traders can pay the exchange back.Brian Kelly, CEO of BKCM, pointed to firms in Asia such as BitMEX allowing 100-to-1 leverage for cryptocurrency trades.

Robinhood does not allow traders to use margin for cryptocurrency, and Coinbase only allows it for professional traders.
Bitcoin bull says the volatility could lead to a big breakout

“You get this crowd factor — everybody’s liquidation price tends to be somewhat near everyone else’s-- when you hit that, all of these automatic sell orders come in, and the price just cascades down,” Kelly, told CNBC.Bitcoin traders liquidated roughly $12 billion in levered positions last week as the price of the cryptocurrency spiraled, according to bybt.com. This mass exodus wiped out about 800,000 crypto accounts.

“Selling begets more selling until you come to an equilibrium on leverage in the system,” said JMP analyst Devin Ryan. That selling begins to “compound” as leveraged positions are liquidated, because they can’t meet those margin requirements, he said.

“Leverage in the crypto markets — particularly on the retail side — has been a big theme that accentuates the volatility,” Ryan added.As the crypto market expands, Ryan said he expects leverage to become less of an influence, especially as more institutional capital comes in.Investors, both retail and institutional, have poured into bitcoin and other digital assets in 2021.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — Coinbase — said trading volume in the first quarter of the year was $335 billion, of which approximately $120 billion was retail and $215 billion was institutional.

Trading volumes totaled about $30 billion in the first quarter of 2020.Mark Cuban weighed in on the leverage aspect for ether, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, on
Twitter last week.

“De-Levered Markets get crushed. Doesn’t matter what the asset is. Stocks. Crypto. Debt. Houses. They bring forced liquidations and lower prices. But crypto has the same problem that [high-frequency traders] bring to stocks, front-running is legal, as gas fees introduce latency that can be gamed,” Cuban said in a tweet last week.

Lending

The other behind-the-scenes cause for selling may have come from the growing bitcoin lending market.Crypto companies such as BlockFi and Celsius allow bitcoin holders to store their crypto with the firm, in exchange for an interest rate of between 6% and 8%. On the back end, those firms lend bitcoin out to hedge funds and other professional traders.

They also allow people to use their bitcoin holdings as collateral for loans.For example, if someone took out a $1 million loan backed by bitcoin and the price drops by 30%, they may owe 30% more to the lender.

″As you hit a certain collateral level, firms will automatically sell your bitcoin and send the collateral to the lender,” BKCM’s Brian Kelly said. “This adds to the massive cascade effect -- there was so much volume that most of the exchanges broke.”

Regulation

The fact that bitcoin is not regulated by a central bank is part of what makes it so valuable to its investors.But that lack of a central authority, and increased adoption has put a target on its back from some in Washington. The Treasury Department announced Thursday it will require any transfer worth $10,000 or more in crypto to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

“The market does not have the same backstops that other more traditional markets do,” said Ryan. “In some ways the crypto markets are cleaner and they’re not being influenced by a buyer of last resort.

”Still, Ryan said regulation can be viewed as validation of the crypto market, and could be a positive for the digital asset.

“The crypto markets are still in their early days relative to other asset classes and so they’re going through a maturation phase where they are scaling and adoption in increasing, its still relatively nascent,” he said. “Volatility is a feature here just as the market develops,” Ryan said.

Bitcoin plunged below $39,000 for the first time in more than three months Wednesday after China said cryptocurrencies would not be allowed in transactions and warned investors against speculative trading in them, despite the country powering most of the world's mining.

The comments sent the unit diving more than 10 percent and dealt it another blow soon after being battered by comments from tycoon Elon Musk and his Tesla car company.

Trading in cryptocurrencies has been banned in China since 2019 to prevent money laundering as leaders try to stop people from shifting cash overseas. The country had been home to around 90 percent of the global trade in the sector.

And in a statement, three state-backed industry associations said "cryptocurrency prices have skyrocketed and plummeted, and cryptocurrency trading speculation activities have rebounded".

The price fluctuations "seriously violate people's asset safety and disrupt normal economic and financial order", said the statement, which was posted to social media by the People's Bank of China.

The notice warned consumers against wild speculation, adding that the "losses caused by investment transactions are borne by the consumers themselves", since Chinese law offers no protection to them.

It reiterated that providing cryptocurrency services to customers and crypto-based financial products was illegal for Chinese financial institutions and payment providers.

Linghao Bao, analyst at Trivium China, said despite the ban Chinese investors can still find ways to buy cryptocurrencies through illegal vendors."There will always be a way to circumvent regulations," he said.

"The point of this order is to tell financial institutions to up their game to detect these crypto-related transactions.

"Bitcoin tumbled Wednesday from $45,600 to $38,570, its lowest since early February, and well off the record high of $64,870 seen last month. It later edged back above $40,000 but analysts have warned it could test as low as $30,000.

"This is the latest chapter of China tightening the noose around crypto," Antoni Trenchev, managing partner and co-founder of London-based crypto lender Nexo, said.- 'Here to stay' -Adam Reynolds, of Saxo Markets, added that avoiding use of cryptocurrency, which can be transferred out of the country, is "essential to maintaining capital controls" in China.

Bitcoin has had a torrid few days. It took a heavy hit at the start of the week after Musk appeared to suggest Tesla was planning to sell its huge holdings of the unit. And that came days after the electric car giant said it would halt using it in transactions because of environmental concerns.

"Elon Musk started the ball rolling," Germany-based crypto analyst Timo Emden told AFP. "It will take some time for them to recover from this shock."Mining cryptocurrency is a hugely energy-intensive process requiring large amounts of electricity in giant data centres.

China, which powers nearly 80 percent of the global cryptocurrency trade, relies on a particularly polluting type of coal, lignite, to power some of its mining.

"If bitcoin was a country, it would use around the same amount of electricity a year to mine as Switzerland does in total," Deutsche Bank analysts said in a note.

However, some Chinese enthusiasts remained unfazed."This has happened before and it happens every year... Crypto is here to stay," said trader and ex-tech industry worker Zeng Jiajun.

The Hong Kong Bitcoin Association tweeted, "It is customary for the People's Bank of China to ban bitcoin at least once in a bull cycle.

"China is in the midst of a wide-ranging regulatory crackdown on its fintech sector, whose biggest players -- including Alibaba and Tencent -- have been hit with big fines after being found guilty of monopolistic practices.

The central bank has also sought to promote its own heavily regulated digital yuan, which it is testing across the country in pilot schemes.-- Bloomberg News contributed to this story --

Bitcoin fell sharply on Tuesday, continuing a major sell-off that began a week ago.The digital currency fell over 13% to hit an intraday low of $38,585.86 at around 12:54 a.m. ET, according to CoinDesk data. It was the lowest level since Feb. 9, the last time it dropped below $40,000.

As of 4:30 a.m. ET, bitcoin was trading above $40,000 again, but still down by about 12%.

Negative news over the past week has dampened sentiment for bitcoin.On May 12, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric carmaker had suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin, citing environmental concerns over the so-called computational “mining” process.

This is where high-powered computers are used to solve complex mathematical puzzles to enable transactions using bitcoin.Musk’s comments caused over $300 billion to be wiped off the entire cryptocurrency market that day.

The announcement to suspend bitcoin payment came just three months after Tesla revealed that it bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, and would start accepting bitcoin in exchange for its products.

Early this week, the Tesla CEO suggested the company may have sold its bitcoin holdings but later clarified that it has “not sold any Bitcoin.

”Then on Tuesday, three Chinese banking and payment industry bodies issued a statement warning financial institutions not to conduct virtual currency related business, including trading or exchanging fiat currency for cryptocurrency.

China’s hard line on digital currencies is not new. In 2017, authorities shut down local cryptocurrency exchanges and banned so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs), a way for companies in the space to raise money through issuing new digital tokens.

Traders in China once accounted for a huge share of the bitcoin market but after the crackdown, their influence was reduced significantly. Chinese cryptocurrency operations have moved abroad.

Bitcoin is still up 40% year-to-date and more than 300% in the last 12 months.Other cryptocurrencies also plunged. Ether, the digital currency that powers the Ethereum blockchain, was down nearly 16% at $2,960.29 at 4:30 a.m. ET.

Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke and has been talked up by Musk, fell 16% to $0.4189.Around $270 billion had been wiped off the entire value of the cryptocurrency market in 24 hours as of 4:30 a.m. ET.

Close to a bottom for bitcoin?

Bitcoin is off by about 38% from its all-time high of $64,829.14 which was hit in mid-April.Vijay Ayyar, head of business development at cryptocurrency exchange Luno, said that a 30% to 40% pullback is “normal” during bitcoin bull markets.

“So this is very much expected after we topped out at 64K ($64,000),” he said.

Ayyar pointed to a roughly 35% correction in January as well as similar falls during the huge run-up in bitcoin’s price in 2017.“We are definitely close to a bottom” around $38,000 to $40,000, he said.

Galaxy Digital CEO Novogratz on bitcoin, crypto and ESG concernsBitcoin bull Mike Novogratz told CNBC on Tuesday that he sees $40,000 as a buying level for the digital currency.

The investor, who runs cryptocurrency financial services and investment management Galaxy Digital, said he expects bitcoin to consolidate in a trading range between $40,000 to $55,000.

“Then we’ll have another leg up. And I say that not just by guessing. We see institutions moving in, and it takes them a while,” Novogratz said.